One summer night this June, the Hollywood Bowl was glowing. Niko Rubio was onstage with Zuri Marley, standing beneath the amphitheater’s familiar sweep of lights, as she and Zuri performed their collaborative single “Ring Ring.” Ziggy Marley was headlining
the show with Burning Spear, and the air was thick with the sound of harmonic lineage.
“You don’t understand what this meant to me,” Rubio says, still sounding a little awestruck by the memory.
It was exactly the type of music Rubio had spent years absorbing through headphones long before she knew what to do with it. She cried throughout the show, not entirely sure why at the time, but certain that she would venture into the studio the next morning.
All of it reaffirmed a thought she’d been having a lot: “I’m trying to make pop songs right now for a bunch of other people, but this is what I like. What am I doing, not focused on that?”
Rubio had spent the previous five years writing songs for other singers, collecting collaborators, and accepting sessions. After so much time sharing her songs, she began doing something else completely: keeping the music for herself. All her work has accumulated into late night swim, an experimental album, full of swatches of reggae, Latin, and trip hop, that releases on Oct. 30. Rubio weaves stories about heartbreak, drugs, and the slippery, occasionally hallucinatory process of finding your way back to your own life.
The album’s first single, “tokyo,” opens with a spoken-word passage that Rubio had initially assumed nobody would listen to. However, the track’s hypnotic beat helped turn it into her biggest release yet as it found a massive audience on TikTok. Recently, she followed it with “kitty,” a song that belongs to the album’s darker, more cinematic world, where the erosive forces of desire, self-destruction, and heartbreak blur beneath the suffocating glow of Hollywood.
Late night swim explores “a theoretical trip that you go on,” Rubio says, and it revolves around a central character: Kitty. “How I started it was I thought, okay, I’m throwing a party for a boy, and I’m sitting in front of the pool, and I’m looking over the Hollywood lights, and it’s nighttime. It’s very Valley of the Dolls, but it’s more. It’s the Nineties and it’s kind of James Bond-y. I’m watching him while crying, but he’s making out with another girl, and maybe that’s Kitty.”
With her producers, she built the small, sealed-off creative world of late night swim, and the record took shape quickly. The album’s first week produced “dream,” which Rubio still calls one of her favorite songs. Then “tokyo” arrived toward the end of the week. It was a song with a 30-second talking verse that she assumed would never work as a conventional single.
That very assumption proved useful: Because she underestimated how many people would hear her song, she didn’t overthink it. When she posted it on TikTok, it reached 250,000 views. Then another 250,000. Then 300,000. Soon, remakes, videos, and even an impersonator account were reeling in hundreds of thousands of views. Rubio watched the numbers accumulate with disbelief. “What is happening?” she remembers thinking.
But the process made her think about how she’d crafted exactly the kind of song she wanted to make. “If I can make a song that has a thirty-second talking intro work as my first single and my biggest song I’ve ever put out in my life, then what can’t I do?” she says.
So much of the album’s DNA ties back into Rubio’s roots, which are deeply planted in the diverse landscape of Southern California. Rubio was born in Los Angeles and raised across Hawthorne, Gardena, Lawndale, and Redondo Beach. Of Mexican and El Salvadoran descent, she grew up with eclectic sounds. Her grandparents filled the house with traditional Mexican music and Spanish-language records. Meanwhile, her mother was a self-described punk girl who loved Linkin Park, Gorillaz, Gwen Stefani, art museums, and the occasional school-skipping adventure. “I had a lot of influence in my life,” Rubio says. “A lot of family influence.”
By 11, she had decided she wanted to become a singer. Her grandparents encouraged her to audition for Spanish-language television competitions, eventually sending her to Orlando to compete on the Spanish reality show La Voz Kids, where she made it to the battle rounds.
For her, the experience did not feel like a childhood detour. It felt like an early glimpse of the life she was supposed to have one day. “Some kids, they do that, and then they’re like, ‘Okay, that’s a funny moment in my life. I just knew from the time I was 11. I was like, ‘I don’t really think I have another choice. I think that this is what I should be doing forever.’”
Still, music wasn’t the only path she considered. In high school, Rubio studied broadcast journalism and writing. During her senior year, a skateboarding accident temporarily paralyzed her right arm after she fell hard on her shoulder while bombing a hill. Although her recovery was serious, it made her certain about a future in music.
Her aunt, seven years older and close enough to feel like a sister, returned from college around the same time. She enrolled in UCLA night school to study music management, and Rubio began meeting young producers and songwriters through her classes. Shortly thereafter, Rubio started attending sessions, learning how songs were made and becoming fascinated by the possibility of writing not only for herself one day but for other artists as well.
At the time, she became obsessed with the podcast And the Writer Is…, absorbing episodes about songwriters and artists with the voracious appetite of a scholar devouring sacred texts. She recalls hearing about Charli XCX’s approach and feeling as if someone had revealed a secret passage into the music industry. Her plan was concrete: win or be nominated for a Grammy for an album she had written with a major pop star, then earn recognition for her own music. “I was like, I need to just become the best songwriter I can be,” she says.
At 19, having just graduated from high school, she approached the songwriter Cash. When he told her to come back in a year, Rubio doubled down and wrote 50 songs in a single month, sending them all to him in a Dropbox folder. “I really just wanted to prove myself as a songwriter,” she recalls.
Shortly after, she found herself working with Gwen Stefani, co-writing the pop single “True Babe” in 2023, and the country-pop duet “Purple Irises” in 2024. Rubio calls her time with Stefani “pivotal” as she soaked up everything there was to know about songwriting. “I was just so hungry for a hit,” Rubio says. She kept writing, kept collaborating, kept learning how to make a song sharper, catchier. She eventually went on to join Suki Waterhouse for writing sessions, meeting “amazing people through [the songwriting] process, who have molded the way I want my career to go because of what they’ve taught me.” A song she wrote for the band the Warning earned her a Latin Grammy earlier this year.
Still, as Rubio’s songwriting career grew, she began thinking more about writing for herself. “I would be like, ‘Oh, this would be such a great song. This could be a hit. I should send it to a big artist.’ … And then it wouldn’t be mine anymore. I couldn’t even go into anything without thinking like a writer all the time, so I lost a lot of my influences, and started forgetting about why I enjoyed making music for a second,” she recalls.
Rubio went to Mexico, which gave her some distance from the fast-paced songwriting world of Los Angeles. While she was there, she began writing in Spanish, which she says gave her newfound freedom. She wrote songs because they were hers to sing.
When she returned, she gave herself a month. She stopped accepting outside sessions and told her producers, Austin Ward and Lester Mendez, to block out the time. She created playlists, mood boards, and a document outlining the album’s sonic and creative direction.
“I know myself,” she says. “If it’s a good beat, I can’t help but be like, ‘Okay, well, let me just record it. Let me just try something.’ There I go again… It’s like, girl, commit to yourself right now,” she remembers thinking. “Just go.”
All the work has paid off. When she went on her first headline tour, the Sunday Girl Tour, she was the artist people were buying tickets for. Now, with the album ready to drop, she’s doubling down on focusing on artistry she believes in. She’s learned to bet on herself and focus on the career she’s always dreamed of. “If I want to give these fans a project that feels the most like me, and be really honest, I can’t be thinking about anyone else.” It’s all paying off.
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